xaoslaad

Even if false tell me why you can't see a cargo plane or bomber at 10 miles when you can see something barely longer than a 747 at 186+ miles. One extreme is as ridiculous as the other.

You realize if you look straight up at a plane at 30,000 ft it's about 6 miles away right? There's also this quote I keep finding, though I can't find a source, so who knows (maybe someone here does can either prove it true or false), "Chuck Yeager claimed he could see the BF109s orbiting over Berlin when he hit the coast of England before crossing the Channel." He was known for having absurdly good vision, but even he wasn't superman. If there is any truth in that comment, even a fraction of the distance it's a massive difference from what we have now. The international space station is also 300 to 460km up and you can spot it in before sunrise and after sunset with the naked eye. It's only slightly larger than a football field. Obviously clouds, fog, precipitation, lighting and on and on can affect that, but even in clear conditions it seems grossly inaccurate. Edit: and there's also the resolution issue. I mean of the eye, not the monitor. Even if you see something at 5,6, 10 miles you're likely not able to tell what it is, let alone friend or foe. But you can still see it.

An-26 flying at me. How about if you don't have radar. What if I make it a P-51D, Bf.109 K-4, F-86F, or MiG-15Bis? There is no radar (yes the F-86F technically..). I just chose the F-15C for a quick look; this thread is largely concerned with visual spotting in planes without radar, though it's a problem even for modern jets as people have mentioned, looking to join on their wingman, etc. Call the solution whatever you want, being hard to spot at 10 miles and being impossible to spot outside of panning around at full zoom (which is beyond ridiculous, let alone hard - my cat leaves smudges more distinct than that on my monitor with her nose) are two different things. Scaling, shading, glinting, some other effects - something could be done to drastically improve the situation and bring it closer to realistic difficulty. As it stands I don't think it's very realistic or particularly fun. At the same time labels are too easy.

We have TGP's, Shkval's, and such to help search for ground targets. And since they're slow or static in comparison to ourselves flying around it's easier to take our time to look for them. And if they get better resolution terrain it will be easier to use white hot and black hot modes to see things, particularly in the A-10C, since now big blobs of pixelated ground can be hard to discern from actual targets. And if they give trees substance so people stop stuffing SAMS in forests another common problem with spotting will fix itself in a realistic way. The only way you're going to get a SAM in a forest is if there is a clearing big enough for it to operate in. And give that it should be possible to spot it, whereas now they can be buried under 3 or 4 trees and virtually impossible to see. Dust from moving targets and smoke from dead targets can queue in other players once one has found the target area as well. With planes in the sky, you can't hope to scan the sky at full zoom looking for fuzzy jets at 10 miles out that look like smudges on your monitor and hope to live. Two different problems by far.

Hard to spot at 10 miles? 10nm with label at normal zoom 10nm without label at normal zoom. Can you see anything? I can't.. 10nm without label at full zoom. You can see something...

I agree. With the higher speed and altitude delivery greater range can likely be achieved. I don't know if the F-14B (if we should get a bombcat) or F/A-18C can drop bombs while supersonic, but even if not that's still a fair bit more speed than you can drop a bomb at in the A-10C and so it will be interesting how much additional range that brings.

Probably stuff like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition Claims 15nm with an ER version being worked on with 80km range, triple that.

So far, not a tick of lag on our first night back to flying. I think a couple more nights with heavier missions are in order before I call it a win, but so far it has been promising.

Just bought Tacview and already loving it. Can't wait for the online feature. But, is there any chance of allowing for the free client, separate thin client only able to connect to the pro server, or browser plugin, being able to connect to a professional server? I feel like a lot of the benefit this provodes is lost if it requires a home license that can then record and do much of the work itself...

Can you explain why that's such a face palm. He speaks truth, even if bluntly so. You can not see aircraft at range anywhere as easily as you should be able. The damage model/AI stuff is just silly sometimes. I was fighting an F-86F with a MiG-15Bis and he was streaming fuel from both wings, and flaps were blown clean off both wings. He was zooming around like everything was cool, nonetheless. I ran out of ammo trying to chase him down and put him out of his misery. While flying back to base without any other recourse I F2'd just in time to see him falling backwards out of the sky and slam into the ground (about 5 minutes later... what???), still in the cockpit. I also don't like seeing the vertical stabilizer blown clean off an Su-25 and watching it flying back to base like it's minor damage, when we can know from first hand experience that there is no way for us to prevent the plane from fish-tailing until we lose control and go into a spin. It just wasn't such a big deal when we had all modern because the cannons and missiles tend to do far more damage to their era counterparts. In contrast older era planes hold up like tanks against each others MG and cannons. Combined with the AI's inability to be daunted by damage it's rather annoying. You can't dispute that the systems and flight modeling are far superior in DCS than anywhere else (though I'll debate ground handling due to the lack of friction the ground seems to have; very skating rink) but you have to take almost everything else about WWII flying with a huge grain of salt. What I _know_ is that a lot of this is already better than it was. And I am sure in time it will be even better. But it still kills it for many people at this time. To answer the actual question: I have almost zero interest in WWI. Anything WWII and up is great.

I followed this thread as well to make some BIOS settings. Interestingly after having made those (before the changes above) I noted the fan isn't running all the time on the system, like it was prior. Even though CPU usage in Task Manager is essentially the same... Edit: This thread: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=68060

I saw something pretty telling on The Flying Pandas server last night. We were experiencing horrible lag, bouncing, all kinds of typical DCS wonderfulness. Then one of the admins hopped on the server, set the process priority to High and changed the Affinity to use just a couple cores and WOW, everything just smoothed right out. I am experimenting on my own server using Process Lasso (just free version for now) to auto set DCS Multipl Priority, High IO Priority, and Affinity as avoiding hyperthread cores and set to 2 and 4 to see if it makes any lasting difference. My fingers are crossed that this will provide some improvement.

I get severe rubber banding with a dedicated server on my LAN as well. I am local, my friend is remote. The problem is intermittent and myself and my friend and the server each have network settings to 2048. That has helped some - have been thinking we should try lowering it even more. We had mixed settings all over the place and every mission was horrible. What really kills me is I can start a mission, watch the AWACS banding everywhere in the sky making a pattern that looks like a heart beat sensor. Obviously unplayable; restart mission, and it works. In particular why I see lag, connected to a 1Gbps hub with gigabit Ethernet to the other system blows my mind. 'server' is a mid powered i7 with 16gb and bad graphics with 3d disabled and a solid state drive. it should be way more than sufficient to run a dcs server. And my last comment: telling people to disable built in security (windows firewall, being a prime example) is opening them up for attacks. Maybe not so much on a desktop behind a wireless router doing NAT, but if they carry that advice over to laptops and other devices they may take to airports, hotels, coffee shops, and other places, you're teaching them to shoot themselves in the foot. A firewall, even a default configured windows firewall, provides some security.

And I think they've said they have no good data to do an Su-33 AFM/PFM. It might be the only FC3 aircraft left in the flight model upgrade dust unless they get their hands on some good data.

Ya, I saw that thread and watched most the videos. I missed the suggestion of the horizontal bars for the rockets. That was along the lines I used as well, but didn't know if it was proper. I've seen it referred to as a 'rocket ladder' which suggested to me the top, ring, and bottom line might be different steps for range, altitude, or angle, or something. This is the thing I'm referring to - you can find official training material for A-A engagements and what sight picture and alignment should look like, but when it comes to A-G you can find stuff on angles and approach, but not really much on sight alignment and picture.

+1 to what Nedum said. It's like the ground un DCS is almost completely frictionless when it comes to anything hut forward motion.

How are you supposed to use the rocket ladder on the fixed sight? Is the dot between the angled lines for rockets oe bombs? Is the dot where they'll hit if you launch at x distance, y speed, z angle, and release at w altitude? What do the lines above and below the 70-mil circle correspond to and what are they used for? I can't find much of anything on the air to ground aspect of this reticle, though I suspect there might be some info in the AN 11-35C-1 manual from 1945 for the K-14A. Sadly all I've seen of it so far are a few pictures from people selling pdf's of it on ebay... Forgive me if this is answered somewhere but after a lot of searching I've come up kostly empty.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/an-elite-f-14-airman-explains-why-the-tomcat-was-so-imp-1610043625 Scroll down to, "The idea was to make at least one of the enemy fighters blow up in front of his wingman's face, thus making him think twice about pursuing us... " and read his take on it. Particularly interesting is the part about the drone.

Indeed, also a D. Not an A or B.

There are pictures of a Tomcat carrying HARMS but as far as I know it never went further than testing. Edit, here: http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-detail-agm88.htm

Ya, maybe not a good term. It just seems there was 'the other stuff' and then semi-permanent attachment of an LTS. And then you could do what we want (drop precision munitions without another aircraft designating) and I don't know if you say the ones capable of having an LTS mounted are a bombcat? Or the ones with the LTS only are a bombcat? If the latter then I guess you could turn a tomcat into a bombcat or a bombcat into a standard tomcat easily enough. It may be splitting hairs - it just seems there were indeed A, B, and D bombcats and A, B, and D non-bombcats. I have no clear picture. Better today than yesterday though.

I'm not insisting on anything. I am trying to get a clear picture myself :) Yes, they mentioned in that article some had LANTIRN, some had TARPS, and I have also read later they had a work around to be able to do both. Anyway, it seems the bombcat updates were a little dynamic as time wore on and improvements came.

Ya, OK, I see that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANTIRN "The pod also featured an internal computer with ballistics data for the various precision munitions carried by the F-14. Data is fed to the pod by the Tomcat’s AWG-9 (F-14A and F-14B) and AN/APG-71 (F-14D) radar, but the LTS in turn only sends video and guidance symbology to the crew's cockpit displays. This means that few wiring and software changes had to be made to the Tomcat in order for it to operate the LTS. All pod controls are in the RIO’s cockpit, but the bomb release button is situated with the pilot. The LTS had a price tag of around 3 million US Dollars each and due to these high costs, only 75 were bought for fleet use. Typically, an F-14 squadron brought 6 to 8 pods with them on deployment, which would be permanently fitted to the non-TARPS jets." So you'd have a squadron of Tomcats with 6 or 8 with the LTS, making them more or less what we're all wanting to call a bomcat, even though all of the ones with the A/B upgrade could probably handle the pod and were probably bombcat capable of there were a pod attached. Since it was a semi-permanent attachment that basically means there were A,B, and D bombcats and non-bombcats, with some A's and B's being bombcat capable and probably all D's being bombcat capable. I'm starting to get the idea though that 'bombcat' is indeed a very loose designation. They also mention VF-32 which was F-14A's from reading and VF-103 which were A+/B's, so it appears yes, both were capable.

OK, so that clarifies some of it. If Block I was to bring in LANTIRN support but was canceled where did that support come in? Was there a smaller upgrade approved, was it rolled into the A/B upgrade?

I don't think it was an A to B upgrade but rather an A and B upgrade. It's not very clear to me. "The A/B initial upgrade, includes structural modifications to extend the F-14's fatigue life to 7,500 hours, improved defensive capabilities and cockpit displays, and incorporation of digital architecture and mission computers to speed data processing time and add software capacity. " Wasn't one of the biggest things about the B the improved engines? That's a pretty big omission to leave off that list. Edit: It also says, "The A/B upgrade had to be incorporated into 157 F-14 aircraft before the Block I upgrade could be added." That's more than all the B's that ever existed by like double. Weren't there like 87 or something? 67 became bombcats. Those numbers are in the ballpark I think. Edit: Wikipedia (with it's references available for these comments) tells me, "A total of 38 new aircraft were manufactured and 48 F-14A were upgraded into B variants. Also, "In the late 1990s, 67 F-14Bs were upgraded to extend airframe life and improve offensive and defensive avionics systems. The modified aircraft became known as F-14B Upgrade or as "Bombcat".